


Faithfully

by jjjat3am



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 13:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6052858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjjat3am/pseuds/jjjat3am
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky and Steve, pre-WWII to present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faithfully

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collection of ficlets that corresponds with a fanmix that you can find [here](http://8tracks.com/jjjanimefan/faithfully).
> 
> Enjoy!

 

_**i. old pine** _

 

_I’ve come to know that memories_

_Were the best things you ever had_

 

The summer of ’37 was unusually hot, filling the air with the smell of melting pavement and rotting food from back alley dumpsters. Steve and Bucky were sprawled on the floor of the apartment in semi-darkness, windows blocked by blankets and Bucky’s shirt.

 

Their next door neighbor, Mr. Whitaker, was listening to the radio loudly enough to hear it through the wall and Steve idly watched a bead of sweat travel down the side of Bucky’s neck.

 

“We should go to Coney Island.” Bucky said, and Steve finally cut his eyes away.

 

“What, right now? It’s too hot, Buck, I’ll choke.” The aminophylline tablets for his asthma were disappearing quickly and he wasn’t sure they were even helping anyway.

 

“No, you dummy.” Bucky rolled over to face him. “We’ll go in the evening; just you and me. I’ll even buy you some funnel cake.”

 

They couldn’t afford funnel cake. Steve grinned back anyway, used to going along with Bucky’s schemes.

 

“Well, if there’s funnel cake…”

 

Steve isn’t sure why it’s this conversation in particular he remembers with crystal clarity from that day, not if they went to Coney Island or not, and if they had funnel cake.

 

Maybe it has something to do with how the slashes of sunlight escaping through the makeshift curtains were bright bands against the skin of Bucky’s torso or how he was grinning sharply, but his eyes were soft when they looked at Steve, and how Steve couldn’t imagine living without this, living without Bucky by his side.

 

In similar shadowed rooms across the city, conversation was held in whispers.

 

_‘War.’_

 

_‘War is coming.’_

 

 

_**ii. maybe tomorrow** _

 

There’d been a lead weight lodged somewhere in his chest from the moment he saw Bucky in his uniform. He’d tried to ignore it, act like normal, but it didn’t help.

 

When he came back to his apartment, Bucky’s only suitcase was gone.

 

No note, no sign of him leaving except for one of his shirts still stinking up the bedroom and dishes from that morning still laid carelessly in the kitchen.

 

Steve got up early and went down to the station, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, but in the mass of uniforms and polished boots the faces were unrecognizable. He watched a soldier and his dame say goodbye. He was dark and handsome, and she pale and blonde and she’d clung to him until he had to untangle her arms gently from around his neck.

 

Maybe it was for the better that he couldn’t see Bucky off.

 

There was a slip in his back pocket, growing smudged after so many refoldings, that said he now had the barest chance of joining him.

 

Weeks later, feeling the pain of a hundred needles pinching his skin, his body reforming under the strain, he clung onto the fact that he could see Bucky again, dressed in uniform and head held high. That way, maybe, they wouldn’t have to say goodbye again.

 

**_iii. national anthem_ **

 

The flash of a camera, the whiff of perfume and the flash of a brightly colored skirt.

 

If this was fame, then Steve could understand why it blinded so many. Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to see pass the indignity of it, how it felt like a cage keeping him from his purpose elsewhere.

 

Dr. Erskine had believed in him, had given him a chance and this is how he was wasting it? It wasn’t right.

 

And Bucky…he got a letter from Bucky, when his tour stopped in New York and he’d crept into his apartment like a stranger, trying not to wake Mrs. Whitaker, a notoriously light sleeper, because waking her would mean an interrogation he wasn’t ready for.

 

Bucky had written the letter a few days after arriving at training camp. His words were full of good-natured barbs and stories about his fellow soldiers, who seemed, if not particularly smart, at least decent men. Steve trailed the familiar chicken-scratch with his fingers, smiling at the uncapped I’s and misspelled words.

 

Nothing on how Bucky was feeling. Nothing about when he was leaving overseas. 

 

Steve took the letter with him and not much else. His old shirts didn’t fit him anymore. Neither did Bucky’s, for that matter.

 

He spent the next few weeks touring his country and punching Hitler in the face in a staged act that had children everywhere squealing in delight and the returning soldiers look at him with contempt.

 

Steve watched them sometimes, young men, aged infinitely older, with jaded eyes and missing parts. He lingered on missing limbs, on labored walks and thought ‘If I had been there…’

 

Maybe. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe he could have made a difference for these men. Maybe Bucky was already fighting on the front lines.

 

Or maybe he was laid out somewhere, the crows marking his grave.

 

Maybe, maybe, maybe. “You can’t fill a stomach on maybes,” is what his mother used to say, until her diagnosis went from maybe to definitely.

 

Maybe.

 

But now it was time for another show, the crowd outside chattering excitedly, the showgirls whispering past him like ghosts. Tonight it was time to give them a show, a invulnerable soldier sent to save them all, not a man who agonized over writing his best friend a letter, because he didn’t even know how to reach him anymore.

 

 

 

_**iv. peggy sang the blues** _

 

_It doesn’t matter where you come from_

_But it matters where you go_

 

Agent Peggy Carter was unlike any woman Steve had ever met.

 

Undisputedly a dame, albeit one who punched like a freight train, she surprised him one rainy afternoon after he’d been jeered off by some real soldiers. It’s not the most embarrassing situation she’d seen him in, but it was definitely up there.

 

He’d always admired her ability to see what was underneath, to speak the truth and stand up for her beliefs. Once, he’d thought that she’d known what would happen to him when he went inside that metal contraption, that she’d seen beyond his frail body to what he was, though she seemed as surprised as anyone when he stepped out again.

 

“You were meant for more than this.” She’d said, conviction in every part of her. He believed her, but…

 

“…the 107th was captured in enemy lines.”

 

_‘the 107 th’_ he thought. ‘ _Bucky.’_

 

Things moved very quickly after that. Almost before he knew it, he was looking at the worried line of her brow right before he plummeted into the night sky.

 

Somewhere below, Bucky was imprisoned and probably tortured.

 

And Steve was finally ready to do what he was meant to do.

 

_No-one gets remembered_

_For the things they didn’t do_

 

 

**_v. behind your eyes_ **

 

The moment he’d heard Bucky’s name pass Peggy’s lips there’d only been one goal in front of him. He would have probably walked to Austria if he had to; fought through the waves of Nazis on his own, on just the barest hint that Bucky was alive.

 

Luckily, there’s Peggy and Howard, and he’s launching into motion as soon as he hits the mossy ground.

 

He let the prisoners go because they weren’t shooting at him and because one of them might know where Bucky was. _Tortured? Hurting? Dead?_

 

He barely remembered their faces, because his eyes only had room for one.

 

He heard Bucky before he saw him, the delirious babble quickening his steps until he’d been outright running.

 

Then there was Bucky. Eyes glassy and chained to a table, he didn’t seem to recognize him. Steve didn’t blame him. These days he had trouble recognizing himself in the mirror.

 

Bucky seemed smaller than he remembered. His cheeks were hollow and there were dark shadows under his eyes. His ribs were visible under his thin shirt.

 

“Oh, Bucky.” The words felt like they’re being torn from somewhere inside him, where a dark hole of fear was barely kept at bay by his dawning relief.

 

Bucky flinched the first time Steve’s fingers brushed against his skin on the restraints, but he relaxed minutely when Steve rested a hand on his ankle while unbuckling the lower restraints.

 

“Steve?” Bucky sounded almost lucid and Steve’s eyes snapped up to look at him.

 

Bucky’s eyes were clear and he was looking at Steve like a man that’d seen a ghost, but at least he recognized him. He doesn’t know what he would have done if Bucky had kept looking at him blindly, never seeing his childhood friend, because of the enhancements made to his body.

 

“It’s me, Buck. I’m getting you out of here.”

 

He drew Bucky’s thin body against his own, sparing a thought for the irony as he steadied him on his feet. Usually it was the other way around.

 

Funnily enough, from then on, through the explosions and the long trek to camp, all he could feel was relief.

 

 

_**vi. brats in battalions** _

 

The bullet ricochets off his shield and into the helpless shooter, right as Steve decommissions the other two HYDRA soldiers that had caught him unaware. He hears a gun discharging behind him and swings around wildly to where he last saw Bucky, only to be confronted by a gun barrel. Bucky offers him a sharp grin over the slumped body of the HYDRA soldier, he’d been fighting and Steve offers one back, mentally cataloguing the way he’s holding his other hand against his body, blood steeping through the gaps in the dark cloth of his gloves.

 

He doesn’t bother thinking about his own injuries, knowing that even the harshest wound would heal in a fortnight.

 

Steve had never thought of himself as a soldier, but this body was built for war.

 

It’s with his improved eyesight that he spots the HYDRA soldier emerging from the fog behind Bucky. He’s got no time for a warning, launching into the few steps that separate him from Bucky to tuck his smaller body against his bulk, twisting so that the shield absorbs the impact of the bullet already in motion. The reverberation shakes through his back almost the same time as something hits his left side.

 

The HYDRA soldier drops and Bucky rests the hand holding the smoking gun against Steve’s back. Steve can feel him grin against the side of his neck.

 

Steve wasn’t born to be a soldier, but sometimes he feels like Bucky was. It’s in the easy way he handles firearms, the way their body count doesn’t seem to bother him as much as it almost tortures Steve. It’s even in the grin pressed against the side of Steve’s neck and how his body is still tense in anticipation of another attack.

 

The sharp call of one of the Commandos makes Steve unclench his fists from the material of Bucky’s shirt and he lets them separate. The clearing fills with their squad mates, dirty and smelling of gunpowder, but thankfully all there.

 

They move on, onto another of the slew of HYDRA bases.

 

The Howling Commandos, led by Captain America, leave a trail of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers across Europe, destroying HYDRA bases and freeing their captives.

 

Bucky continues watching his back and Steve watches his. After all, it’s how it’s always been.

 

 

_**vii. two coffins** _

 

It felt like there had been an icy fist incasing his heart since the moment Bucky’s hand slipped through his fingers.

 

Even Peggy, with her strength and compassion hadn’t been able to melt it.

 

“Steve? Steve!”

 

Maybe in time she could have, but right now, the only thing he could think of, as the icy ground grew closer and closer, was how fitting it was, that he and Bucky should share a final resting place, both of them incased in ice and far from home.

 

How, maybe in a few minutes, he’d see Bucky’s sharp grin again.

 

Steve took his shield in hand, bracing it against his torso like a grave mark.

 

The radio sunk to static, the glass shattered and ice filled his body.

 

Then, darkness.

 

 

_**viii. polaroid picture** _

 

He doesn’t remember what Bucky had been saying to him that had made him grin so wide, doesn’t even remember ever seeing a camera anywhere, which is unusual, because sometimes he feels like he remembers everything, can’t ever forget.

 

It bothers him, because it could have been anything; a pointed barb, a wistful ‘remember when…’, even a reference to Dumdum’s legendary underpants. Bucky always knew how to make him laugh until his sides ached. Maybe that was his superpower.

 

Now, Steve looks at the laughing men in grayscale and sees a stranger, as removed from the man he sees in the mirror every morning as the pictures of the boy he was in the days before the serum.

 

Those men had Bucky with them. Now, all Steve had were the pictures.

 

 

**ix. song of joy**

 

Tales of The Winter Soldier sweep across the harsh Siberian plains in whispers. _He is a ghost,_ mother whisper to their children, smoothing back hair from their wide eyes, _A murderous spirit._

 

_He comes in silence upon the freezing winds and leaves no one alive to tell of his face._

 

It’s this childhood apparition that haunts Ekaterina now, as she peers out the window of the car running through the frosty Siberian night.

 

Her father is driving and he is uncharacteristically nervous, his hand straying every few minutes to the gun she’s seen him hide in the bulky folds of his winter coat. Next to him, her cousin Maksim has a loaded submachine gun laid across his lap. The ghost of her mother sits next to her on the bench. She’s been dead for 3 years now.

 

It’s all familiar to her, the reality of her life she’s faced with every day, but the tension almost suffocating the car is brand new.

 

Her father has never been a man too concerned with doing things by the rules. He transported goods without questioning his employer and it supposed that it was only a matter of time until he picked the wrong one.

 

She’s trying to remember an old rhyme her grandmother taught her to protect against evil spirits, even as something in her scoffs against it. Still, there is something supernatural about the darkness outside, where the snow is swirling hypnotically in the glare of the headlights.

 

_He comes cloaked in winter and his anger is as freezing as the clutch of frost._

 

A silhouette stands stark against the light.

 

Then the windshield explodes.

 

She’s dead before the old words can even pass her lips, gaze locked with a pair of blue eyes.

 

Blue like the depths of a lake in winter, dangerous, yet inviting.

 

In that moment she understands: prayers hold no sway here, for he is neither man of god.

 

He’s a machine.

 

 

_**x. thinking of you** _

 

When Steve wakes up in the 21st century it’s with the ghost of Peggy’s voice still trapped in his ears and the cold of displaced air where Bucky’s hand should have been still clutched in his fist. The alien surroundings make it even more apparent how much he’d lost, because while the world has moved on in a spectacular fashion, he hasn’t, doesn’t even know how.

 

So he sticks with what he knows: the weight of the shield in his hand, the whizzing sound the bullets make as they fly past his face and the weight of the world on his shoulders. As long as there is a crisis he can deal with, as long as there are orders to give and people to protect, he is fine. He’s strong and fast and everything everyone expects of him. For a little while he even has something resembling a team to lead, even if he looks at Tony Stark and sees a ghost, and when he’s staring down spies, aliens and the Hulk. He knows how to deal with crisis, with combat.

 

It is the silence that comes after that’s the most difficult to deal with.

 

After all is said and done, and Thor disappears with his brother in chains, Steve returns to his Brooklyn apartment. He only lasts a few months.

 

How can he, when every street corner wounds him with laughter and bruises, both a staple of his younger years. Where every vaguely familiar façade makes him ache for the absence of a careless arm thrown across his shoulder and a secretive whisper that made him wheeze with laughter instead of asthma.

 

Brooklyn is Bucky much more than Europe was Bucky and it _aches_.

 

He’s never had a body to bury, never had a grave where etched letters could remind him of reality. Instead he’s made the whole of Brooklyn a memorial to Bucky Barnes, had painted his silhouette onto every street, just so he could convince himself, if only for a minute, that things are back to the way they were.

 

So when Nick Fury offers him a job, complete with an apartment in Washington D.C., he jumps at the chance. There’s not a lot tying him to New York except for ghosts and the still ugly silhouette of Stark tower.

 

In Washington he’ll be nearer to Peggy’s nursing home, all the easier to work on his promise to visit her more often (not that she remembers it at all). She is a ghost too, of sorts, except her he can touch and hear and comfort.

 

In Washington, maybe he won’t keep expecting a ghost to meet him at the next street corner.

 

 

_**xi. gasoline** _

 

The mask hits the pavement with a muffled thump that sounds loud in the ensuing silence and then Steve can barely hear anything over the rush of blood in his ears.

 

It’s Bucky, can’t be anyone else, despite the sparse sunlight glinting off a metal arm and the unaccented Russian. But the eyes…they aren’t like Bucky at all. Bucky never looked at him like that, so blankly, not even when he was strapped to a torture bed and delirious.

 

Steve dodges a knife aimed at his throat and a knee to his gut in quick succession, feeling the strength of the movements, the sheer power.

 

That’s new too. Before, Bucky had never hurt him, not intentionally. Sometimes his fingers had dug too strongly into Steve’s ribs, leaving finger shaped bruises that Steve never let him see.

 

But this is different, Steve realizes when the knife tip slices through his upper arm. This man wearing the face of a ghost has Bucky’s blue eyes, but none of his love.

 

Still, Steve isn’t blind. This is his second chance, one he’d never thought he’d get.

 

There is still Bucky somewhere behind those eyes and the knife, hidden behind an exterior forged in frost and Steve is going to do his damndest to get him back.

 

 

_**xii. seen it all** _

 

SHIELD breaks apart spectacularly, its secret painted across every media outlet in the world. Steve spends most of the backlash of it, kept safely in a hospital bed, Sam sitting by his bedside, while Natasha protects them both on the outside.

 

He keeps waking up from nightmares of Bucky falling, of Bucky in pain, of Bucky turning away from him. It’s like Brooklyn all over again, except this time he knows that Bucky isn’t a ghost and that he’s out there somewhere, hurt and confused. That he might be hiding because he’s afraid of Steve.

 

He keeps seeing those eyes flicker from cold flatness to fear and recognition and right back again.

 

It makes Steve reckless, this knowledge, and it takes the combined efforts of his friends to keep him from charging in blind after Bucky. Natasha disappears for a few days, following up contacts, trying to trace every step the Winter Soldier makes. Meanwhile, Sam drives them across the USA, to abandoned warehouses and factories that only ever seem to contain dust and people that shoot at them.

 

They talk a lot in the car, Steve opening up about the war and the years before it, and Bucky, always Bucky, in everything. He appreciates the fact that Sam always seems to find the right words to say to cut through the ghosts to the reality at hand.

 

“I’m afraid.” Steve confesses once, at an empty intersection in Kansas City, whispering it like a secret in the stillness between them.

 

“Of Bucky?” Sam asks, incredulous.

 

“Of screwing this up.”

 

Because sometimes he’s so scared, he wakes up paralyzed in his bed in a multitude of hotel rooms. He’s terrified that Bucky won’t even give him a chance and that he won’t have the words to make him stay. He’s more terrified than he’s ever been in his life, not even when facing a metal chamber and its multitude of needles.

 

Still, he goes on, fighting the HYDRA agents on their tail and bickering with Sam over who gets the corner bed. Hopefully, by the time he finally stands face to face with Bucky, he’ll be strong enough to endure his gaze.

 

 

_**xiii. miss you** _

 

Bucky knows the man on the bridge.

 

Not the way he knows his knife, sharpened into an extension of his body.

 

Not the way he knows his arm and the pinch of its constant movement, the heavy foreign weight of it against his side.

 

Not the way he knows his mission, ever-present and guiding his hands.

 

He knows the man on the bridge like he knows to get up when he falls and to never stop moving in Siberian winters because they will swallow you whole.

 

He knows him like he knows breathing.

 

He just doesn’t know anything else. So, he runs and hopes the memories will catch up in time.

 

 

_**xiv. your arms** _

 

They finally track Bucky down to an abandoned SHIELD facility in Minnesota. He and Sam split up at the entrance to cover more ground, even though they can hear Natasha muttering about how it’s a stupid plan over the intercom.

 

Steve spots the glint of metal right before Bucky has him pressed against the wall by the throat. There is a moment of stillness between them, where Bucky’s grip doesn’t grow tighter when it should and Steve gathers all his courage to look up from where his gaze is stubbornly locked onto the place where shoulder meets metal.

 

He looks up and their gazes lock. There’s the barest hint of recognition in those blue eyes and suddenly Steve finds the words to say.

 

“I’m sorry.” Bucky’s eyes widen and his grip releases. Steve catches his wrist on the downswing and holds it between them, feeling the metal beneath his hand contract.

 

“I don’t remember what you should be sorry for.” Bucky finally croaks out and the inflection behind the words is so familiar that it makes Steve weak in the knees.

 

“That’s okay. I can’t seem to forget.” Steve can feel the corners of his lips twitching into a smile; watches Bucky follow the motion with his eyes. “Come home with me, Bucky.”

 

Bucky stares at him. He looks scared, almost as scared as Steve feels, but there is recognition in his eyes, a familiar presence.

 

“Okay.”

 

 


End file.
